Paul Starr

Paul Starr is co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect, and professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University. A winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and the Bancroft Prize in American history, he is the author of eight books, including Entrenchment: Wealth, Power, and the Constitution of Democratic Societies (Yale University Press, May 2019).

Recent Articles

The news that the owner of the Weekly Standard may shut it down highlights how conservative political journalism and media continue to change as a result of one of the most important recent developments in American politics—the collapse of the center-right. A decade ago, as I recalled in an op-ed in The New York Times in October, prominent commentators confidently asserted that the United States is a “center-right country,” a claim that had some plausibility when George W. Bush was president. But since then, first under Barack Obama and now even more under Donald Trump, the center-right has lost influence nationally and even within the Republican Party, leaving many people with those views politically homeless. Indeed, as Republicans have moved right, what counts as “center-right” has moved further right too, from the Rockefeller Republicans of a half century ago to the Bush Republicans and now even to many traditional conservatives and neoconservatives...

Update (November 21, 2018): The Washington Post reports : Rep. Brian Higgins of New York said he had changed his mind [and endorsed Nancy Pelosi for speaker] after securing an “agreement in principle” that Democrats would undertake a “serious good faith effort” to advance legislation lowering the Medicare eligibility age to 50 as well as a trillion-dollar infrastructure blitz. In a statement, Pelosi praised Higgins … and said his proposal to allow Americans as young as 50 to “buy in” to Medicare is “central to this debate, as we work to build on the Affordable Care Act.” In the piece below published yesterday, I was urging Democrats to focus on early eligibility for Medicare as the most feasible and politically potent idea for substantially advancing health-care reform. Pelosi’s agreement to make a “serious good faith effort” on that issue should push it to the forefront of discussion among House Democrats in the...

Just as he had in 2016, Donald Trump defied the conventional wisdom about how to win in 2018 by making inflammatory statements about immigrants and refugees. This year, when he might have emphasized the state of the economy, he chose instead in the final weeks of the campaign to whip up hysteria about the immigrant caravan in Mexico, claim that refugees bring in gangs and terrorists, and call for an end to birthright citizenship. Trump’s incendiary rhetoric has renewed a debate about whether he and other Republicans who have made similar appeals to their base are acting impulsively from the gut or according to a rational political logic. The results of the 2018 election now provide more evidence on that question, though not a definitive answer. Before the election, Matt A. Barreto—a UCLA political scientist who is a co-founder of Latino Decisions, which advises Democratic candidates— wrote that although Trump’s anti-immigrant campaign might resonate with his...

Not all shocks should surprise us. When political leaders summon up the dark forces of racial hatred and xenophobia, violence is bound to follow, whether or not they order it directly. The murder of 11 Jews in a Pittsburgh synagogue may have seemed like a throwback to the bloody chapters of the past, but it carried an unmistakable, present-day stamp of presidential influence. Shortly before the accused assassin, Robert Bowers, entered the Tree of Life synagogue Saturday morning, he posted a message on social media identifying HIAS, the Jewish agency that resettles refugees, as the immediate source of his fury: “HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.” Where would Bowers have gotten the idea that refugees are “invaders” who “kill our people”? That is hardly a random thought today in the United States, nor is it confined to the political...

Many people talk about independents as though they are a coherent group in America, but independent voters and candidates are all over the map—politically and geographically. Although the “independent” label suggests a high-minded detachment from partisanship, the great majority of independents lean toward one party or the other. In a New York Times op-ed yesterday, political scientists Samara Klar and Yanna Krupnikov estimate that about 36 percent of independents lean toward the Democrats and 42 percent toward the Republicans, while the remaining “pure” independents pay little attention to politics and vote infrequently. Like independent voters, independent candidates come from across the political spectrum. Some are to the right of the GOP and some to the left of the Democrats, while others position themselves in the intermediate space between the two major parties or wage personal campaigns promising to be above politics. Even when they lose, they may...